So....that discussion on "they want us dead" spawned an entirely new political theory for me. I ended up developing a new political spectrum over the course of today, that contextualizes my own ideology, all mainstream ideologies, as well as this dark neoreactionary ideology that seems to want to push us toward technofeudalism. Theoretically, i could have also envisioned this as a political compass, but I think it works better as a spectrum with my own ideology on one end and the dark enlightenment on the other. Without further ado:
Okay, this is going to take a while to explain, but ultimately, this entire spectrum comes down to the core question of: "does the economy exist for humans, or do humans exist for the economy?"
For me, the economy exists for humans, and I, of course, adopt the far left of this spectrum, but I do want to explain the rest of it before getting to me.
Death
So...on the other end of the spectrum is "death." For these people, the answer to the question "does the economy exist for humans, or do humans exist for the economy?" is that humans exist for the economy, and that when humans are no longer useful, well, mass starvation is on the horizon. People might think I'm hyperbolic for thinking that this faction actually exists. But, as commenters pointed out on the "they want us dead" article I wrote on earlier today, people also thought the people reporting that the holocaust was a thing at the time were treated the same way. They couldn't believe the depravity of people. And honestly, I think we're having the same lesson now in the 2020s. Evil really does exist, and some people are sociopaths.
We have these people within the trump administration, or at least aligned with them. They're not a huge faction of people, but they're billionaires, and that gives them a seat at the table. And honestly, as I pointed out, I think the reason there's so much of a push from this dark shadowy group to dismantle democracy is they know what's coming. They know that AI is gonna automate away tons of jobs, possibly with no replacement, and their solution to this problem is to use the force of government to quell rebellion, destroy democracy, and well, let the nonproductive starve. They're anti humanist in orientation and evil.
But...if you think of the current conservative attitudes toward work that are more mainstream, it's not surprising. These guys think that morality is fixed, social structures are fixed, and that people need to earn a living. They believe that property is a god given human right, and that they have a right to billions and billions of dollars, and feel no obligation toward society in giving that up. let the masses create their own wealth, and if they can't, well, they deserve to die. I mean, when you really think about it....if you follow modern right wing theory to its logical conclusion, yeah, in the age of automation, when the working classes are idle and no longer useful, they'd rather see mass death and starvation than to share. And if you doubt the depravity of such people, just look at Gaza. Just look at the state of former colonial states in Africa. That's the future for the rest of us if this faction of the ultra wealthy has their way.
And that's why they're anti democracy. They are a tiny minority of wealthy people. The masses, obviously, would never consent to this, and they know it. They fear democracy. So they want to dismantle it, and solidify power within an authoritarian state where they can use the military and police power to protect their stuff from the masses. Because when you think about it, that's what society has been about since its inception. Protecting the stuff that rich people have accumulated and forcing the rest of the population to work for them. The difference is, they suddenly find that they suddenly no longer need the services of the masses. Yeah. If you think that I'm being hyperbolic here about these people, I hope you're right, but I really have a grim view of humanity and civilization since really digging and analyzing this stuff. I mean, the darkest conflict explanations that you can imagine just keep coming back as the primary answer why things are the way they are. And I really do think that any progressive populist movement to improve things has been sabotaged, and that the wealthy would rather have authoritarianism when their property is threatened over redistribution. It's the only way I can rationalize the past decade of politics.
Servitude
So...as you can tell, the servitude part of the spectrum is massive, and consists of multiple factions. Basically, it contains the entire mainstream overton window on politics. Dark enlightenment is currently a small number of billionaires and terminally online 4channers that punches well above its weight because it's weaseled its way into the trump administration's second term and plays a strong role in the project 2025 crap. The vast majority of people, probably like 95-97% of people are within the servitude part of the spectrum.
In a sense, the servitude spectrum incorporates all "jobist" ideologies: conservative, liberal, and leftist. Because as bob black would say, all mainstream ideologies are conservative, because they all believe in work.
Conservatives
The true, most purist form of this ideology is likely the conservative branch, and this is the branch that my own views developed in opposition to. Think about it. For most of history, population growth is a good thing. Because more people means more production. It means more wealth. A bigger military. It's only with the dark enlightenment and AI and automation and the questions they pose that suddenly a large population becomes a problem for the billionaire class. For most of history, a large population benefited it, because it meant more surplus value going to them.
And ultimately, much of society developed around that idea. So, we wage slaves, of the wage slave classes, our entire lives are centered around work. We're taught about the importance of hard work from a young age. We're told of the dignity of work. We view billionaires as "job creators" and are taught that we should clamor for their jobs and be grateful for the "opportunity" to work. We're told that if we work for them, the wealth will trickle down. Of course, as we know, the wealthy just wanna keep most wealth for themselves. They wanna lower their taxes, and have us work for the wealthy. They advocate for the reduction of safety nets, the reduction of taxes, small government, and of course, jobs jobs jobs. Unlike the ultra wealthy of the dark enlightenment in the tech bro sectors who wanna do away with the jobs, the mainstream conservative movement believes in jobs, and believes in work. They believe all have a duty to work, and if you can't earn your own wealth in a capitalist system, well, sink or swim. They believe in limited to no safety nets, cruelty to the poor, and justifying the extreme wealth of the wealthy. They are the ultra capitalists, the purists, the Ayn Rand types. While ancaps end up leaning more toward aligning with dark enlightenment in practice, more mainstream "free market" types want something closer to the gilded age as their ideal period of society, where we saw massive economic growth, but also, no regulation, robber barons controlling everything, union power being crushed, and no regulation.
In recent years, these guys have taken a protectionist bend. While historically neoliberal, in the modern era, they've become protectionist. Keep in mind, Trump in his first term and in his second, two different animals. Trump in his second term is far darker than he was in his first. He is more dangerous. Back in 2016, he had this populist hype of "Making America Great Again" through protectionism: imposing tariffs and deporting immigrants to keep jobs in the US and to keep then in the hands of Americans. I guess his second term is still marked by these policy goals, given his volatility and SOME of his authoritarianism, but yeah there's some darker stuff going on in the background only the left is really noticing. I wouldnt consider trump himself as dark enlightenment btw. But he is a useful idiot for those people, and he has aligned his administration with those types, probably because they're donors and he'll do anything for money.
Liberals
However, for historical reasons that would require a massive post of their own (or alternatively a chapter in that book I'm trying to write, cough cough hint hint), liberals and leftists have been caught in the jobist web themselves. They also support the idea that humans are to work, and they support jobs, almost for their own sake, heck, let's be blunt, for their own sake, but they also believe in a fair reciprocal deal for workers. Liberalism's support can be traced back to labor unions, and unions have derived their power from their work. As they see it, without a system of work, they lose their value, when they lose their value, what happens to them? They see the problem the dark enlightenment proposes, and as a result, many of them oppose automation and AI, consider it "demon tech", and fear a world without jobs, because they'd rather preserve the status quo.
In a way, liberals are quite "conservative" in preserving the social contract of work. Their approach is "a fair day's work for a fair day's pay." They believe everyone has a duty to work, but that society should reward people for working. While conservatives preach the values of hard work and how if you want to have a good life, you gotta put in the work, it's the liberals who put in the effort to make that the case. They want you to earn money for your work. To rise and fall on the merits. But if you don't work, they kinda still have the "yeah you deserve nothing, screw you" mentality. While the right will scream the left wants people to get "free stuff", the left preaches "a hand up, not a hand out."
These guys became prominent with the New Deal, which as we looked at recently, emphasizes full employment. They believe in using Keynesianism to stimulate job creation in bad times, and paying down the national debt through extra productivity in good times. They believe in Fordism, the idea of paying your workers properly so that they can buy your products, and then you use the money you get to invest in companies that produce more and more stuff. Work, consume, work, consume. The modern economy actually came from liberals. It came from the New Deal. As we discussed, we could've moved in a direction of working less, but no, under them, it's "jobs jobs jobs." So these guys have kept us stuck on a cycle of working, consuming, working, consuming.
Honestly, push comes to shove, a lot of these guys also would rather, in the face of mass unemployment, have the government step in to create jobs for the sake of keeping people employed. Modern liberalism is so entrenched in the doctrine of jobs, and keeping it going, that they would rather have us digging holes and filling them up again because they'd liberate us from this fate. In a sense, because they fear what will happen next. A huge driving force behind preserving jobism among the left is fear of what would replace it. It's not just the neoreactionaries of the dark enlightenment "pro death" right they worry about, they also worry about the anti capitalist left and how this could lead to the end of capitalism as we know it. If we no longer need to work and consume, what will we do? The moralists, such as the Christian types, fear what a life that ins't full of toil will do to people. People might sit around and start sinning! They might drink, or gamble, or do drugs, or maybe they'll sit around and think, and out of that, comes people who develop entirely different moral systems and ideas for how things should be. Basically, this is a gamble to them. it could lead to a good place, but it could also lead to some dark crap. It could lead to the rise of fascism, or communism. It could lead to human centered capitalism, my ideology, or it could lead to the dark enlightenment. Rather than take a risk, they'd rather just keep humanity to the current system for as long as people, keeping people on a never ending cycle of work and consumption.
But, unlike the right, they want to be more humanistic about it. If you ask them about whether the economy exists to serve us, or us them, they're likely to embrace a middle ground option, preaching reciprocity, and this idea that society should take care of us, but that we should work. The point is, they also keep us on a cycle of servitude, they still keep a friendly face on it.
Also, btw, the "democratic socialists" of the Bernie Left are just more of these guys push comes to shove. They might support more expansive safety nets and government intervention like me, but at the end of the day, they still preach jobs over redistribution. They just, once again, want people to be paid well. Liberalism is a spectrum after all, ranging from moderate conservative ideas, to something verging on leftism.
Leftism
In my spectrum chart, I rolled leftism up into liberalism, and I stand by that. here's why. Leftism is just, really extreme jobist liberalism. Their big argument is that rather than have capitalism, we should have socialism, with the government controlling everything (sorry demsocs, you're libs by my standards). We saw this in communist countries. Those places werent jobless utopias, rather they were hellish dystopias where the government forced everyone to work, but everyone had a job. They did job guarantees on steroids, running a centrally planned economy, but ensuring everyone had a job. Of course, working was mandatory and those who didn't would be basically imprisoned or killed, so they were psycho too.
I ain't a fan of the communist left. I view communism as many in the west do: as a failed experiment that should never be completed. But for me, part of the reason communism failed was that it failed to properly criticize capitalism, and failed to offer compelling solutions. As I see it, the problem was forced servitude. For them, it was alienation. Work was still good and dignified and we needed more of it, they just opposed one specific mode of production, believing it took power from the people, and that if we had *rainbow spongebob motion* communism, that everything would be great. No, no it wouldn't. if you actually want to make human dignified, you need to give them their freedom. We need capitalism in some form. I just believe in mass redistribution instead within that mode of production.
Freedom
At the core of my ideology, I believe in freedom. I view the debate between the other factions as one between whether humans should be forced to work, or left to starve. But no one really seems to like to discuss the third option: HOW ABOUT NO?! HOW ABOUT NEITHER OF THESE? HOW SOCIOPATHIC ARE YOU PEOPLE?! When asked whether the economy exists to serve us or we exist to serve it, the economy exists to serve us. I believe work as, for most for human history, a necessary evil, but in the modern era an increasingly unnecessary one we keep around for far longer than necessary. And this just leads to unnecessary suffering. Seriously. I look at this cultish attitude we have toward jobs and see it as insane. And I look at the people on the other side of the spectrum as the sociopaths that they are.
I believe we should free people from work. I believe that social structures, which have been designed around work, should be modified to allow for this. Property rights, from a functionalist perspective, serve as a motivation to work. In an era where work becomes increasingly unnecessary, we should move away from a property rights system that allows excessive accumulation for a minority. We should rethink our social contract, questioning the necessity of work in the modern era. In an era where automation and AI does away with the jobs, we should use our democratic voting power to vote for redistribution. We should support expansive social programs: universal basic income, medicare for all, free college, public housing, a reduced work week.
My big difference from the liberals is my orientation toward work. Much like the dark enlightement has more anti work attitudes than traditional conservatives based on efficiency and not wanting to pay workers, mine comes at it from a populist, more pro working class ethos. I want people to be taken care of regardless of their productive worth. And we should change society to accommodate that.
In a sense, i view my own vision as the highest vision for the economy. If I had to rank visions, I'd do it like this:
Freedom (human centered capitalism)- The ideal, what we should aim for
Democratic socialist/New Deal Liberal left- If forced to work, it's better to have a society that works for the masses than one that works for the wealthy
Conservative- I mean, I guess it's better to serve than to starve
Leftism (communism)- Just...no. These guys killed millions of people over a failed social experiment that never solved anything
Death (dark enlightenment)- These guys are the literal epitome of evil. At least the communists meant well, even if they were almost as bad.
What about anarchism?
Yeah, anarchism fits in the freedom section in theory, but given their radical leftism, they'd be another failed experiment. They wanna go back to monke basically. We all live in the jungle, hunting and gathering, no state to oppress us, but at least we're free. And then we die at age 30 from easily preventable diseases. And then some state comes along and oppresses us anyway. It doesn't solve anything. So here it is as a footnote. I'm inclined to say it's a hybrid of "leftism" and "freedom", but like most full on leftism it doesn't deliver on its promises. We still want civilization and all. We just want it to be, well...civilized.
Conclusion
But yeah. This is my description of politics in the 21st century. What separates it from the 20th is that it does include possible visions for a future in which AI and automation breaks the work system. While most mainstream ideologies seek to preserve work, there are some that seek to create a new order as humanity moves beyond it. The difference is, one vision is very positive and utopian, and the other one is very negative and hellish. Sadly, we seem to be trending toward the hellish one with the dark enlightenment, whereas I support the utopian version in which the future is a life of leisure. The difference between which one we get depends on whether we change our social structures to accommodate us. Does the economy exist to serve us or do we serve it? if we exist to serve it, a world without work is a world in which we have outlived our usefulness to the wealthy and need to be culled. If it exists to serve us, we should change our social structures so that it does that.
And of course the spectrum of servitude has varying attitudes depending on whether you got the left or right versions of that. The right believes in social darwinism in which we need to work or die, and the left supports a more reciprocal system where we should work but at least we should be paid for it. This is where most of society is at. This is the core debate between the right and left, republicans and democrats, conservatives and liberals/progressives. Or at least it should be if the billionaires werent pulling the liberals right themselves. Still, they'll at least profess the idea that you get what you deserve and that you should actually get it while the right speaks to meritocracy, but just gives us trickle down economics, which doesn't work.
And yeah...
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